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“... going anywhere. He always had been a Liberal, or had been a Fabian, or had been a friend of Henry James or Bernard Shaw. And he was so often nearly right, that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore.’ To this I would join a feeling, fed by his Experiment in ...”

“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... such as Falmouth and commuter-belt towns around London; the Tories underperformed in parts of West Yorkshire; and there were shifts in the geographical spread of the Labour vote in London. In the Assembly elections, Labour closed to within one point of the Conservatives in the West Central Tory heartlands – the gap ...”

“... The first mental health clinic in Senegal – perhaps the most Westernised region of French West Africa – was not built until 1956. And in any of these colonies there were places for hundreds, at most, of the mentally-ill in populations of many millions. Only where there were significant European settler populations – in Algeria, Southern ...”

“... Redmond O’Hanlon’s account of a journey to Borneo, undertaken with the poet James Fenton, was a grand deception, in which the ostensible search for an indigenous rhinoceros on the slopes of a mountain fastness turned out to be so much camouflage. Clues as to what was really happening could be glimpsed in the structure of O’Hanlon’s narrative ...”

“... and figured as an ethical alternative to exports from the slaveholding colonies of the British West Indies. By choosing to purchase ‘free’ sugar, traders and consumers, both British and American (especially the abolitionist Quakers of the eastern seaboard), could attempt to erode the domestic markets on which slave traders preyed and prospered.Of the ...”

“... Like most biographers, Anthony Masters starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter ...”

“... the guise of a kind of literary frolic, is a would-be lethal attack upon an old friend, Henry James. The issues here are not altogether simple. It is certain that James had for long held Wells’s fiction in very high regard. He is on record as informing a group of Cambridge undergraduates in 1909 that Kipps was ‘the ...”

“... There is an old belief still prevalent in West Africa that many women send forth their souls on night-flights while their bodies are peacefully sleeping: they meet other women’s souls, their okra or sunsum, on the tops of banana trees, where they work magic. The Ghanaian novelist, B. Kojo Laing, makes use of this theory in his story of modern Accra, Search Sweet Country ...”

“... was mixed. He spent more than a decade discouraging Quaker activists in North America such as Anthony Benezet from bothering the British government with proposals to ban the slave trade, and led the 1783 Quaker campaign to Parliament only after he realised that anti-slavery enthusiasts within the Society of Friends would be happy to proceed without ...”

“... about family and school. Born at Gospel Oak, Betjeman moved up with his parents to better-off West Hill; fans will remember his touching invocation of the house there (‘Deeply I loved thee, 31 West Hill!’), as well as some very subtle verses (‘Lissenden Mansions! And my memory sifts/Lilies from lily-like electric ...”

“... no place in the South African model; industrialisation had cut them off from their rural origins. Anthony Sampson, who spent a creative four-year stint as editor of Drum in the early Fifties, described as a ‘genuine and massive misunderstanding’ the Afrikaner belief ‘that the blacks, like the Afrikaners, wanted to return to their tribal roots and ...”

“... The other day, I found myself in a taxi queue with Anthony Blunt. He looked frayed but fervently cheerful, much as if he had just been dug out of the ruins of his own bombed house. Never mind the furniture, the books and the glass: the ceiling had come down, but the dear old family dining-table had taken the strain ...”

“... and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, the two stories that most audiences, in the ‘West’ and ‘East’ alike, would today think of as embodying the essential characteristics of The Arabian Nights. It would be easy and conventional to deprecate this as exoticising invention, but the ravelled history of these tales, early and late, discourages ...”

“... textbook and the first volume of what was to become Compton Mackenzie’s quadrilogy, The East, West, South and North Winds of Love. I embarked on it with hope and confidence, but after only a few pages had to give up and turn for entertainment to the medical book. Considering myself a mature and experienced reader, I was much chagrined at this and ...”